In
music, as in life, themes return.Introduction:
In 1970, in New Mexi­co, Abbie Conant, a straight-A junior high student with
an opening in her course schedule, is encouraged to take up the trombone by a
couple of football players.She
likes it. She becomes very good very fast. Her senior year in high school, she
auditions for first trombone chair of her school orchestra. She gets
it-"much to the chagrin of one of those players."

Ten
years later, the reprise: Ab­bie Conant, with technique to burn and degrees
from Temple and Julliard, tries out for the first trombone chair of one of
Germany's premier orchestras - the Munich Philhar­monic. Thirty-two players
audition behind a screen, and No. 16 - mis-named on her application as:
“Herr Conant” --is, overwhelmingly-- the orchestra's first choice.

But
the directors of the Munich Philharmonic respond to their orchestra’s first
female principal brass player in its 100 year history with something more than
chagrin.And the games they play
with Abbie Conant for the next 13 years – which include 11 years of
lawsuits, enforced physical exams and the loss of $30,000 – isn’t
football, but hard-ball.

Ordeal
of a Musician

As
she talked about it over a midnight dinner in Foggy Bottom last Thursday,
Conant’s strong, square face – she’s 38 now -- looks a little weary
“Oh, it was weird”" she recalls, “so Franz Kafka.”Nothing direct. You'd go up to the [Munich Philharmonic’s] office on
some completely unrelated business, and they'd see who it was, and they'd just
sidle around you and stare. And then say, ‘I see, Frau Conant,
you have a lawsuit pending against the orchestra.

Maybe
we won't renew your resi­dence permit.’ Which means you're out. Your
contract with the orchestra is for life; but if you can't live in the
country…

The
war of nerves went on. She was kept on as first chair -- but forbid­den to
play solos. She was set up to play yet another test audition, this time of the
hardest pieces in the or­chestral repertoire. The test audition was delayed
for two years. Still, she withstood. She neutralized the depor­tation threat
by moving to the next county from Munich where she got permanent residency.
"And my teaching job now [with the State University in Trossingen] pays
me more than the Munich Philharmonic ever did, even after I won equal salary.
Now I have the time for 'Miriam.'"

"Miriam"
is the chamber-opera-­cum-performance piece that her hus­band, William
Osborne, composed for her in 1990 -- and which, on one stop of their
seven-week U.S. tour, she brings tomorrow to Annandale's Community Cultural
Center at North Virginia Community College. They've been touring it for three
years, mostly throughout Germany and mostly to stunning (and stunned) reviews.
They brought "Miriam" to St. Louis last May for the Women's Brass
Conference, convocation of the still somewhat scarce female instrumentalists
of this nation's orchestras. That's where Sylvia Alimena, conductor of
Washington's acclaimed Eclipse Chamber Orchestra and her-self a National
Symphony hornist, caught up with it. And was over­whelmed.

"You
cannot imagine the power of this piece unless you were there in the
room," Alimena says. "All these professional women, just shaken to
their cores by this piece. Of course it resonates particularly with other
players, because-believe it--the kind of treatment Abbie went through Munich
is not, by any stretch of the imagination, unknown in the United States. And
that's all I'll say.... But there's something deeply, deeply hu­man to it.
Eclipse [under whose aus­pices "Miriam" is being presented]
ordinarily doesn't present other peo­ple's work; we're still getting our own
concerts off the ground! But I saw this and said, 'This must be seen.'"

In
"Miriam," Conant gets to do and be everything she wasn't during her
Munich years. A fierce wraith in a flowing nightgown, she raves, paces, stabs
her hands until the blood flows. Sometimes she sings; sometimes she hisses;
sometimes, only the huge voice of her tenor trombone is utter­ance equal to
her rage. 'You know, studying acting, singing, mime [which she did for two
years in preparation for “Miriam”] was so freeing. You re­alize how much
you miss in the per­formances of most concert musicians, when they just walk
out and bellow sound at you. They're putting forth a lot of energy, but
they're not listening to their audiences; they're not accept­ing anything
back. I wasn't originally going to do all of 'Miriam': just the trombone
parts. But all the sopranos Bill worked with turned out to be pains..... Now
I can't imagine going back to abstract music. It's so satisfy­ing to do
something different."

In
"Miriam," Conant rules the stage; she's the Callas to Osborne's
Bellini in a sort of postmodern mad scene with a feminist subtext. But the
contrast with her behavior during the conflict in Munich couldn't be higher.

“You
know, right up until about 1988, when I learned that even the newest guys in
the orchestra were making more than I, I thought I could walk away from the
whole thing," Conant says. "I was not a radical person. I was just
finding my footing here in this strange culture; and, moreover, I was a
professional. Even in my first conversations in '80, with [conductor Sergiu]
Celibidache, when he demot­ed me to second trombone with no reason, I
thought, well, it can't be just that I'm a woman. So I said to him, look, you
didn't criticize me at all about my playing during my trial year. Tell me what
you don't like. I've been trained, I have resources, I know I can play the way
you want. What do you want me to change.And he turned to me and said, 'You know the problem. We need a man for
the solo trombone.'And, you
know, I thought, well, maybe second trombone wouldn't be so bad, I could do
that. But I promptly got extremely depressed for about two weeks, and decided,
no. It was just so obvious. They had not one legitimate criticism of my
work."

Unlike
the anti-heroine in "Miriam," Conant gathered her forces and worked
the system. Her first choice of lawyer wasn't wise; she says he ne­glected to
tell her about a statute of limitations on her salary claims, which resulted
in her losing $30,000 of back pay. But her husband generated an avalanche of
letters on her behalf. Conant took her case to the Munich mu­nicipal
government. "We were, literal­ly, fighting City Hall," she
remembers. At one surreal moment, in response to the Philharmonic's claim that
she wasn't physically strong enough to do the job, Conant found herself nude
in a doctor's office breathing into a tube and having blood drained from her
ear.

"Afterward,
they asked if I was an athlete, because my blood was so well oxygenated,"
she recalls proudly. (She passed the test; the courts rejected the orchestra's
case for lack of evidence.) "But the whole process was so degrading...
not just that stuff, but other guys in the orchestra say­ing, 'Gee, I can see
your nipples tonight' right before you walk out on stage, just to throw you
off... primi­tive .… After '88, I was in it for the long haul. I was going
to stick this out even if I did get another job. And after all those years, I
was beginning to enjoy the fight, a little. But then I got the conservatory
job; and by that time, I was more interested in the music theater work Bill
and I were doing."

"The
whole process was so degrading. After '88, I was in it for the long
haul."

-Abbie
Conant

As
to what's next for her, she's not sure. Osborne's finished a new
piece-"bag ladies on their way to a Big House"-including, of course,
a part for acting trombonist. She's a little weary of Europe. "It's a
very narrow-minded place. And I eat too much there." Meanwhile, though,
"Miriam" is her life. 'The name means 'bitter.' And she's certainly
defiant. But she's also the first composer the Bible mentions. And she's not
ruined, the way Violetta in 'I,a Traviata' is. At the end, when her wrist
cuffs clamp down on her and she's silent, she seems defeated. But there's
something in her stare that lets you know she knows what's happening to her,
and isn't giving in. And that's a start."